So, you’re one of the lucky ones that got their hands on that sweet, sweet paycheck protection program moolah. Fantastic. Now, you need to figure out how to track all of this money, so you can maximize your forgiveness. Make sure you keep all supporting financial documents separated so you can provide it to your banker at the end of the 8 weeks.
USING BANK ACCOUNT + GOOGLE SHEETS
Probably one of the easiest ways to track your PPP expenses is to set up a separate bank account. In fact, many banks are requiring that you do just that. Now, it’s not quite that simple. Your payroll costs, despite the program being the paycheck protection program, there are some costs that are not included in the forgiveness. Here are some examples:
FFRCA Emergency Sick Leave & Paid Family Leave (that is paid back via tax credit)
Compensation, salary or wages in excess of $100,000 per-employee
Employer-paid portion of federal payroll taxes known as FICA (e.g. social security and medicare payroll taxes)
The program does include some fun things for hospitality, such as cash tips or equivalents, but we don’t quite know how exactly to calculate that yet. So, with all that being said, we can pay other covered expenses out of this bank account, but we can’t pay payroll out of that account. Instead, we have to calculate the weekly amount in a spreadsheet, and make a transfer.
Luckily for you, we’ve gone ahead and made that spreadsheet for you. Fancy, huh?
GET THE SPREADSHEET
Sign up with your email address to get the spreadsheet and also receive news and updates related to bookkeeping issues related to COVID-19.
With us sharing that spreadsheet, let me just give a quick disclaimer: “This sheet is for reference only and should not be relied upon as tax, legal, or lending advice. The following is meant to be used as a preliminary tool to estimate the potential forgiveness of the PPP loan proceeds and is not meant to be used as the final calculation of loan forgiveness. We anticipate additional guidance and definitions to be forthcoming over the next few weeks and we will update accordingly. Additional guidance may have a significant impact on the amount of loan forgiveness.” Thanks to Ascend Consulting and Amy Walker, CPA for the help building this resource.